Lone Passenger Train Chugs Up History’s Grade

Passenger trains rolled dramatically through Mexico’s history, its revolution, its landscape. Now they are reduced to this: a once-a-week run through the roadless desert.

The rattling, six-hour ride through northern Zacatecas state may be the last workaday passenger train service in the country. On Jan. 1, for the first time in 127 years, passenger trains stopped running to Mexico City.

By the time most passenger runs were quietly canceled in 1999 by the last in a long line of presidents from the former ruling party, the railways had been devastated by decades of mismanagement. A 1996 railway privatization was aimed at moving freight, not people.

But if Mexico’s railways were always about struggle--the vast effort to lay track through mountain and desert, the war trains that carried armies to battle in the 1910-17 revolution--this little two-car train upholds the tradition: Its survival took a battle.

“We laid down on the tracks day and night, for three nights, men, women and children,” said Maria del Refugio Gonzalez, describing how villagers blocked privatized freight trains last April to demand that passenger service be restored.

Like generations in the railroad town of Opal, she earns extra money by selling corn gorditas (three for 10 pesos, or $1) to train passengers.

“If the trains had rolled over us, we would have been crushed. But if the passenger train was canceled, the town would have died,” Gonzalez said, resting in a darkened rail car with her now-empty food pot.

Opal, like many of the villages on this track, is so small, so sunbaked, that even the sleeping dogs seem made of adobe mud brick. Separated by 60 miles of sand and mesquite from the nearest paved road, Opal has no other form of transport.

Mexico has another train--for tourists. One of the private companies that bought railway concessions has a 400-mile daily run through the scenic Copper Canyon to the northern Pacific coast, complete with a dining car.

Mexican trains carried 37.4 million passengers a year at their peak in the 1970s, but by the early 1990s buses carried most travelers. Decades of low maintenance made the trains slow, unreliable alternatives.

Other than the tourist runs, this little passenger train through northern Zacatecas state appears to be all that remains.

It’s hot, dry and half an hour late--all as usual--when the train leaves Canitas, 315 miles north of Mexico City.

Canitas used to be a railroad hub, but not many people stop anymore, said Jose Santos Arenas, who has spent most of his 52 years running the crumbling six-room Canitas Hotel--which now has no guests.

Julio Cifuentes, a third-generation railwayman, is the ticketmaster, carefully collecting the fare of 105 pesos ($10.50). Gray-haired Ramon Rodriguez Navarro helps load baggage.

Seeing off the train, Hector Hernandez, operations manager for the new private owners, Ferromex, said passenger service “is just not profitable anymore.”

“It’s heavily subsidized wherever it still exists,” he said. “It’s just that in Mexico, there are fewer funds for subsidies. It’s a simple question of money.”

The train is subsidized by the Zacatecas state government, but very soon into the ride, it is evident the brakes aren’t working on the two passenger cars: They slam into the locomotive with ringing metallic bangs.

The air-conditioning and the interior lights don’t work either.

On its route to Torreon in Coahuila state, the train picks up everything from harvested crops to squalling babies, motorcycles and spare tires.

It stops at small, turn-of-the-century stations--La Colorada, Pacheco, Opal--where whole towns turn out to wave to the weekly train.

“The people would stop the trains again. You can see it in their eyes, in the way they talk,” said Canitas station employee Bacilio Rodriguez, who saw most of his co-workers get laid off in the privatization.

At the first stop in La Colorada, rail-thin farmer Arturo Sanchez tosses sacks of beans aboard. “If we didn’t have the train, they’d just rot right here,” he said.

The government had promised to keep passenger service going after the 1996 privatization, but quietly broke its word.

The state-owned Mexican National Railway Co. is soon to be liquidated, and Mexico City’s cavernous Buenavista rail station stands shuttered.

“People stop by the station and ask about the trains, and they’re disappointed,” said station guard Taide Hernandez. “They say, ‘Oh, it was so pretty to travel by train.’ ”

As the train sidles past Simon station in Durango state, near the end of its run, ticketmaster Cifuentes looks out into the desert night and recalls the “ghost trains”: Rail cars filled with soldiers who put down a 1958 railway workers’ strike.

That strike challenged the Institutional Revolutionary Party--known as the PRI--at the height of its seven-decade rule.

The soldiers told workers, “See that telegraph post? We’ll hang you from it,” recalled Cifuentes, then a 15-year-old apprentice telegraph operator.

The strike--a fight for a kind of democracy that Mexico wouldn’t achieve until 2000, when the opposition finally won the presidency--was crushed.

Raul Cerda Velazquez, a bearded young farmer, attributed the loss of the passenger trains to corruption in PRI governments: Literally born of the railroads and the 1910 Revolution, the PRI betrayed both.

But a soft chorus of “Si!” rises in the darkened, swaying rail car when passengers are asked whether President Vicente Fox--who took office in December after unseating the PRI--is more sensitive to the needs of the poor.

Many have the sense that after a journey begun in 1910--and with many shuntings onto sidings--maybe democracy is finally pulling out of the station.